1.1 What is Film Noir?
1.1 What is Film Noir?
The Film Noir Myth
Film noir is more than just 1940s and 1950s crime films infused with a higher quotient of sex and violence than their 1930s counterparts. There is, however, as Andrew Spicer (2002, vii) argues, a prevailing noir myth that “film noir is quintessentially those black and white 1940s films, bathed in deep shadows, which offered a ‘dark mirror’ to American society and questioned the fundamental optimism of the American dream.”
There is, of course, some truth contained in this so-called mythology, although it is more complex than this. Film noir is both a discursive construction created retrospectively by critics and scholars in the period after the first wave of noir films (1940–1959) had finished, and also a cultural phenomenon that challenged, to varying degrees, the dominant values and formal patterns of pre-1940 cinema.
Within this mythology, there is generally agreement as to the influences that shaped film noir and provided its parameters.
For example, most studies followed the lead of the French critics in the 1940s and pointed to the importance of the pulp stories and hard-boiled fiction of writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Cornell Woolrich.Later, other writers, such as W. R. Burnett and David Goodis, were added to this list.
Often this took place because the novels and short stories from these writers were used as bases for a number of key noir films in the 1940s s—notably Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Glass Key (1942); Woolrich’s The Black Curtain (1941, which was filmed as Street of Chance in 1942), Phantom Lady (1944), and The Black Angel (1946);
Cain’s Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946);
Burnett’s High Sierra (1941); and Goodis’s Dark Passage (1947). However, it was not as simple as this, and it is not entirely correct, as discussed later, to assume that the dark, nihilistic vision expressed by many of these novelists was merely replicated in the film version.
LIGHTING!
A significant aspect of the film noir myth is its formal style,
especially - LIGHTING -
the chiaroscuro lighting :
Its low key and frontal lighting setups
that produced dark areas interspersed by extreme brightness.
This style, which was largely the result of restricting the use of fill lights,
thereby accentuating the harsh effect of the key light,
was often associated with the influence of German expressionism on film noir.
SET COMPOSITION
This visual style, reinforced by the fragmentation of space
through set design and camera compositions
that produced unstable lines and surfaces,
was perceived as suggesting a dislocated world
permeated by alienation and human despair.
These tendencies found in German expressionism were,
it was argued, imported into Hollywood by
German émigrés who had fled Germany after Hitler assumed power in 1933.
This included directors such as
Fritz Lang (The Woman in the Window, 1945),
Otto Preminger (Fallen Angel, 1946),
Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity, 1944), and
Robert Siodmak (Criss Cross, 1949)
as well as German-born cinematographers such as Karl Freund, Rudolph Maté, John Alton, and Theodore Sparkuhl.
Again, the significance of film noir style and the role of the German émigrés is not as simple as some studies suggest.
German expressionism peaked almost 20 years before the proliferation of film noir in Hollywood, and these German émigrés worked on many Hollywood films that had no relevance to film noir. Also, there were many noir films produced in Hollywood in the 1940s that did not have German filmmakers working on them.
- Geoff Mayer "Introduction: Readings on Film Noir" pgs. 3-4. (Links to an external site.)
Mayer, Geoff, and Brian McDonnell. Encyclopedia of Film Noir. Greenwood, 2007.
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